Minimizing Cost of Smart Grid Operations by Scheduling Mobile Energy Storage Systems

Energy storage systems (ESS) are effective solutions to reduce the cost of smart grid operations due to their ability to store and supply electricity on demand. Traditionally, ESS have been used to implement a plethora of cost reduction techniques for smart grid operations such as temporal supply-demand shifting, frequency regulation, voltage regulation etc. However, the stationary nature of ESS limits their flexibility, potentially leading to low utilization and risk being a stranded asset. In this work, we explore the use of Mobile ESS in implementing such cost reduction techniques in a grid consisting of multiple microgrids. We develop an algorithmic framework to assign multiple Mobile ESS to various microgrids of the smart grid across several days. Our framework attempts to maximize the cost reduction achieved due to Mobile ESS assignment minus the routing cost. We show that our algorithm is a polynomial time $1/e-$1/e-approximation for the NP-Hard problem of optimal assignment of MESS.